As the debate intensifies around Russian ad buys in the US election, a fundamental aspect of Facebook’s platform has gone mostly overlooked. Facebook’s auction-based system rewards ads that draw engagement from users by making them cheaper, serving them to more users for less money. But the mechanics that apply to commercial ads apply to political ones as well. Facebook has created a powerful system that dynamically, and unpredictably, changes the prices of political ads. The system also encourages polarization by incentivizing ads that users are predisposed to agree with.

Unless Facebook makes its internal data public, it’s impossible to say which ads reach which audiences, or how much candidates spend to reach them. After the 2016 presidential election, a senior Facebook employee said that Trump’s cost of reaching voters was substantially lower than Clinton’s, according to communications reviewed by The Verge. Trump was able to reach a larger audience than Clinton for less money, the employee said, illustrating the power of mastering Facebook’s ad platform. At a time when the company’s advertising business is under increasing scrutiny, Facebook’s platform dynamics could represent a new avenue for regulators to investigate.

Facebook disputed the premise of my story, saying that polarizing ads — by their nature — alienated large swathes of the population, making people less likely to share them in large numbers. But in a new story today in the Wall Street Journal, Georgia Wells and Deepa Seetharaman pick up the thread — and political advertisers tell them edgy ads outperform more straightforward ones.

Ahead of the 2016 election, former Democratic strategist Melissa Ryan tested a range of online campaign ads including “pretty and ugly, nice and incendiary,” she said.

“Ugly and incendiary won every time,” including on Facebook, said Ms. Ryan, now an editor of the weekly newsletter Ctrl Alt Right Delete, which analyzes the alt-right movement.

As I wrote last year, this isn’t true in every case. The Journal identifies other factors that influence the reach of an advertisement, including the size of the advertiser’s budget and their targeting criteria.

But they also talk to campaigns who found just what I did: that it pays to be polarizing.

Those changes aren’t slowing down Omar Navarro, a 29-year-old Republican candidate running against Maxine Waters in California’s 43rd congressional district. Mr. Navarro, who said he previously worked in social-media marketing for five years, said that while positive messages can do well on Facebook, edgy and extreme ads do better. “People tend to gravitate toward something that’s provocative,” he said.

One Facebook ad campaign urged users to like Mr. Navarro’s page with the message, “Had enough? Help me KICK self-serving Maxine Waters out of office!” The ad, which helped Mr. Navarro gain about 20,000 new followers, depicts Ms. Waters in black and white tones, while Mr. Navarro is in color.

“She’s painted in the dark, and I’m in the light,” he said. “She’s evil, and I represent good.”

When I wrote my story, Facebook hadn’t yet created its public archive of political ads. Not only does the archive display the ad’s content, it displays its reach as well. While what counts as “edgy” will always be somewhat subjective, academics and journalists can now make more quantitative judgments about what kinds of ads perform well on Facebook.

Perhaps, as Facebook says, polarizing ads reach fewer people because more users are likely to hide the ads when they see them. Or perhaps, as the campaigns interviewed here suggest, polarizing ads help candidates build a large following. We now have publicly available that should help us sort fact from fiction. The next time someone tackles this subject, the answer should be much more definitive.

Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, commander in chief of the Myanmar military, made history this week when he became the first major political leader to be banned from Facebook for contributing to a genocide. But good news for Hlaing: he’s still welcome on the Russian Facebook clone Vkontakte, James Hookway and Myo Myo report. But even Vkontakte drew the line with another Burmese hate preacher:

The army’s Myawaddy television network has also switched to the VK site after being banned from Facebook, as have other prominent supporters, including the hard-line Buddhist nationalist monk, the Venerable Wirathu, who was repeatedly banned from Facebook, and whose account on VK was also suspended on Thursday.

“We closely monitor situation in Myanmar,” a spokesperson for VK said in an email. “We have specifically hired Burmese-speaking moderators to monitor publications in communities and users pages. Publications with calls for violence will be deleted by our moderation team, and users who host them will be banned.”

Doug MacMillan asks former Stanford president and current Alphabet chairman John L. Hennessy why Google would go back into China. Hennessy waves his hands until the question goes away:

Mr. Hennessy: It’s hard to ignore one of the largest countries in the world. The question to ask yourself is, are the Chinese people better off with a limited version of Google, or are they better off with no access at all? And that’s not so clear to me. There’s a shifting set of grounds of how you think about that problem, and how you think about the issue of censorship. The truth is, there are forms of censorship virtually everywhere around the world.

If you’ve been waiting for the federal government to make a big, splashy effort to counter foreign interference in our elections, wait no more! The Federal Bureau of Investigations has … launched a website! It includes a series of videos about protecting your political campaign from hacking, what to do if your security has been breached, and the perils of using public wifi networks. Take that, Putin!

Reddit posted an update about how the recently discovered Iranian influence campaign operated:

Unlike our last post on foreign interference, the behaviors of this group were different. While the overall influence of these accounts was still low, some of them were able to gain more traction. They typically did this by posting real, reputable news articles that happened to align with Iran’s preferred political narrative – for example, reports publicizing civilian deaths in Yemen. These articles would often be posted to far-left or far-right political communities whose critical views of US involvement in the Middle East formed an environment that was receptive to the articles.

Through this investigation, the incredible vigilance of the Reddit community has been brought to light, helping us pinpoint some of the suspicious account behavior. However, the volume of user reports we’ve received has highlighted the opportunity to enhance our defenses by developing a trusted reporter system to better separate useful information from the noise, which is something we are working on.

Strikethrough is an excellent series of video essays about our current media moment from Vox’s Carlos Maza. Don’t miss his latest piece, which examines “firehosing” — the tendency of autocrats to tell as many lies as possible, for reasons that may surprise you. A provocative weekend watch:

Wil Wheaton decamped from Twitter for Mastodon and found it just as hostile, Megan Farrokhmanesh reports:

Wheaton deactivated his Twitter account earlier this month, citing the company’s decision to keep Alex Jones on its platform. He moved over to Mastodon, one of the only platforms to present itself as a viable, direct rival to Twitter. However, Wheaton says his time on Mastodon was hardly any better. In a lengthy blog post published earlier this week, he describes the community as treating him “with more cruelty, vitriol, hatred, and contempt” that those on Twitter.

And yet, the platform blocked users from sharing the Winchester Star stories about Francesca’s case. When WIRED tried to share the pair of aforementioned articles to Facebook Tuesday, one was marked as being against Facebook’s Community Standards and the other was removed for spam.

“It’s been an annoyance more than a problem. We don’t think certain stories are being targeted; it seems kind of random,” says Brian Brehm, a reporter at The Winchester Star and the author of the stories. He says several other articles from his publication have also experienced issues with Facebook. “I wrote a story about a dog who died, and it got blocked.”

It turns out there is a way for public schoolteachers to make a good living: by developing a huge following on Instagram and then selling custom educational content to their audiences. Julia Reinstein talks to Amy Groesbeck, who says she makes $200,000 a year using social media and Teachers Pay Teachers, a kind of Etsy for classroom decorations. Of course, the internet never sleeps, and Groesbeck lives in constant fear that people will stop buying her stuff:

“As the market becomes more saturated and more teachers start joining, of course there’s going to be more competition,” said Groesbeck. “It feels stable, but I know that it’s not a forever income. So that’s why I do continue to teach, because it is a guaranteed salary.”

“I also find that I kind of have to reinvent myself at times, because as it’s become more saturated and people create similar things, you have to find a way to set yourself apart,” said Groesbeck. “One of the difficulties is that you have to remain relevant, I guess. I do fear sometimes that my stuff will get old and dated and people won’t want them anymore.”

Apple first introduced its pride Apple Watch face during the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June. Inspired by the rainbow flag, it’s designed to celebrate gay pride and stand against discrimination to LGBTQ people. While Apple regularly touts its “unwavering commitment to equality and diversity” in highly-produced gay pride videos, the company has its limits. iOS developer Guilherme Rambo has discovered that the pride Apple Watch face is “hardcoded to not show up if the paired iPhone is using the Russian locale.”

Reddit users and Apple support forum users have been questioning the lack of a pride watch face in Russia over the past couple of months. The Verge has tested this on an iPhone running the latest iOS 12 beta, and the pride watch face simply disappears once you switch to the Russian locale.

Sometimes I wonder why YouTube doesn’t just aggressively copy Facebook and give Google the true social network it has always wanted for itself. Well, here is a feature that YouTube has aggressively copied from Facebook:

YouTube is giving creators more ways to fundraise with a bunch of new tools it announced today. Still in beta, the group of tools is called YouTube Giving, and it includes options for fundraisers, community fundraisers, campaign matching, and Super Chat for Good.

The fundraisers feature lets fans donate to campaigns started by creators through a donate button. While the features are only open to a few creators so far, a fundraiser you can currently donate to is the Hope for Paws Fundraiser, which raises funds for animal rescue and recovery. YouTube says it’s covering transaction fees during the beta period, but it doesn’t specify if there will be fees once the feature fully goes live.

“Bad faith politicking about the way search algorithms work makes it harder for tech companies to solve the real problems,” writes Renee DiResta:

The conversation we should be having—how can we fix the algorithms?—is instead being co-opted and twisted by politicians and pundits howling about censorship and miscasting content moderation as the demise of free speech online. It would be good to remind them that free speech does not mean free reach. There is no right to algorithmic amplification. In fact, that’s the very problem that needs fixing.

Farhad Manjoo finds real reasons to be concerned with Google’s power, though they’re different from the president’s:

A lot of people made fun this week of the paucity of evidence that Mr. Trump put forward to support his claim. But researchers point out that if Google somehow went rogue and decided to throw an election to a favored candidate, it would only have to alter a small fraction of search results to do so. If the public did spot evidence of such an event, it would look thin and inconclusive, too.

“We really have to have a much more sophisticated sense of how to investigate and identify these claims,” said Frank Pasquale, a professor at the University of Maryland’s law school who has studied the role that algorithms play in society.

Picking up similar themes, Will Oremus points out the tricky position Trump has put journalists in when it comes to criticizing tech platforms:

Now, with tech platforms under fire, Trump smells a similar weakness—and a similar opportunity. His smears of CNN and the New York Times go only so far, when people can find much of the same critical reporting in dozens of other outlets via Google, Facebook, or Twitter. But if Trump can undermine the credibility of the platforms themselves, then his supporters will have nowhere to turn, except for the insular world of his state-approved right-wing outlets.

As clearinghouses for news, the big internet platforms are deeply flawed, just as the mainstream media are. Those who care about a functioning democracy and an informed public shouldn’t stop pointing out those flaws. But with Trump now actively attempting to undermine both institutions in his quest to convince voters that truth isn’t truth, the jobs of critics and activists just got a lot more complicated. They have to be ready to press tech companies on their algorithms, their privacy practices, and their anti-competitive behavior—but also, when necessary, to defend them against the right wing’s bogus claims of liberal bias.

Sword & Sworcery is a classic iOS game that won many awards for its beautiful retro design and charming story. In the original version, players could tweet any of its whimsical dialogue snippets directly from the game. But when they ported the game to the Nintendo Switch, the game’s developers took a different approach, reports Nathan Grayson:

“Twitter support has been cut from the Sworcery Switch Edition,” said creative director Kris Piotrowski, somewhat ironically, on Twitter. “The reason for this is simple: When we first launched Sworcery many moons ago, Twitter was fun & nice & cool. Now, in the year 2018, Twitter is a vat of toxic waste and we want nothing to do with it.”

Happy Labor Day to all, and maybe stay off the ol’ tweet box when you’re grilling burgers.